Published Articles

AJC Reporter (Questions): Hello — This is Craig Schneider with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution [AJC]. I am writing a story on the controversy surrounding gun-related research, and I would greatly appreciate if you would give me a call.

Dr. Miguel Faria (Answers): Hi Craig, I received your questions and have arranged them in a question and answer format for convenience.

Reporter’s Question #1: People such as Mark Rosenberg say that the NRA has intimidated the CDC and other groups to the point where they do virtually no research on gun-related violence. What would you like to say about that characterization?

Dr. Faria's Answer: I think that characterization is absolutely wrong. I was one of several critics, among them Drs Timothy Wheeler and William Waters IV, and criminologist Don B. Kates, who testified before a Congressional Committee in Washington, DC, in 1996. We testified that much of the gun violence research was based on politicized, result-oriented research with preordained conclusions. In other words, it was mostly political junk science. Congress then passed legislation prohibiting taxpayer money from being used for "gun control" research and...

In Part I of this three-part series I laid out the background and general intentions of public health gun control activists in the early years of their campaign. In this part we relate the events that led to exposure of the Centers for Disease Control in its crucial roles. Those roles were the channeling of taxpayer money to public health academicians prominent in gun control advocacy research, and conducting its own campaign of taxpayer-funded gun control advocacy. An example of the latter is a CDC-funded newsletter published by the Trauma Foundation, a San Francisco gun control group. (photo, right)

Coincidentally, President Obama this week signed a gun banner’s wish list of executive actions he will take to advance gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. One reads, “Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.”

This is directed toward action that Congress took in the mid-1990s to remove $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget that would have gone toward more gun research. I will leave to my legal colleagues the question of whether a...

That [public health researchers] prefer the term “gun violence” is revealingof their mind set in approaching the problem, because it puts the emphasison guns and not on the humans who misuse them.Dr. Timothy Wheeler, Director,Doctors for Responsibie Gun Ownership (DRGO)

In the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut school mass shooting, many have called for new restrictions on gun owners. The blood at Sandy Hook Elementary School wasn’t dry before mainstream media pundits, scheming politicians, and career gun control advocates began heaping condemnation and slander on American gun owners. Blaming innocent gun owners for the murderous actions of a few high-profile mass shooters is natural to them, since they blame guns for crime, rather than the humans who misuse them.

But one class of gun control advocate in particular has become vocal since Newtown. They had been silent for many years in the ongoing political assault on gun owners. In the weeks since Newtown we have seen a flurry of news articles from doctors and medical organizations (see this announcement from the American College of Physicians). They...

Stalin — Breaker of Nations by Robert Conquest (1991) covers the life of Joseph Stalin, from his childhood in Gori to his death at his Nearer dacha (Kuntsevo) near Moscow on March 5, 1953. This book is 346 pages, including bibliographical notes and index. The book is easy to read, well-organized, and ideal for the beginning student of Soviet history and Stalinism. It contains two sets of photographs that put faces on the victims of Stalin, adding tangible personification to the almost surreal sense of totalitarian horror, i.e., socialist terror incarnate! Consider the photograph in the book of the seven Bolsheviks elected to the Politburo in 1924 after Lenin's death; six — i.e., Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Trotsky (killed with pick axe), Rykov, and Tomsky (possible suicide) would be killed (four shot) by the remaining one, the strongest hyena of them all, Stalin.

Through the sequential Congresses of the Party, we can follow Stalin's career as he ascends the levels of power with words and deeds, until he reaches the zenith of despotic, autocratic, and absolute power, and then the Congresses cease convening. Stalin rules with his inner circle, his...

KGB — The Secret Work of the Soviet Secret Agents by John Barron (Reader's Digest Press, 1974) is a classic KGB espionage saga set during the Cold War!

This is a seminal book and monumental work on the history, the (then) current methods, organization, goals, of Soviet espionage — i.e., KGB foreign intelligence with its First Chief Directorate — and internal security operations — i.e., the Second Chief Directorate.(1)

The author, John D. Barron (1930-2005), was an American investigative journalist, a brilliant Reader's Digest writer and editor, and one of the foremost scholars of Soviet espionage during the Cold War. He also wrote Operation Solo: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin (Regnery, 1996). He was an American patriot.

This book detailed and exposed all the KGB officers posted across the world who were then known to the Western security services. The KBG counted with a disinformation campaign slandering Barron, calling him a fake and his book a fabricated Zionist conspiracy! The fact, as later admitted by KGB Officer Oleg Nechiporenko, is that Barron's publication in 1974 of KGB — The Secret Work of the Soviet Secret Agents dealt a crushing blow...

The latest shooting rampage of 26 people, including six adults and 20 children in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, is a senseless tragedy, and words cannot convey the horror and the magnitude of the loss of innocent life. The second deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history was carried out by 20-year-old Adam Lanza (photo, left), a loner with a personality disorder — and in critical need of psychiatric evaluation and treatment. Once again, these deadly rampages are the result of failure of the mental health system.

Consider the case of Jared Loughner, a 22-year-old disturbed individual who shot and attempted the assassination of former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona. He also killed five others, including an innocent 9-year-old student and a judge, and wounded fourteen other people in 2011. There were signs of psychiatric illness and social pathology, that should have alerted those around him and called for mental evaluation and psychiatric treatment. But Loughner, like Lanza, fell through the obvious cracks.

The case of Loughner in Arizona (photo, right) is particularly revealing because a consensus has been...

In the book, Castro's Secrets — The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine (2012), author Brian Latell, a professor, scholar, and retired CIA officer who had been active in foreign intelligence for 35 years, relies extensively on information provided by half a dozen Cuban defectors and several retired CIA officers. However, the most intriguing and reliable revelations (i.e., pure facts without any embellishment or speculation) come to light from Florentino Aspillaga Lombard ("Tiny"), the most knowledgeable and valuable foreign intelligence officer to ever defect from Cuba's powerful Directorio General de Inteligencia (DGI).

1987: The Cuban Year of the Spy

Tiny Aspillaga defected that fateful summer in 1987 in the midst of the turbulent and historic years of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika — but still four years before the total collapse of the Soviet empire. (Reagan with Gorbachev, photo right) Aspillaga had served with distinction in the elite ranks of the DGI and had even received a personal commendation from Fidel Castro. After Aspillaga began working with the CIA, he immediately exposed dozens of Cuban double agents, who had infiltrated...

In a recent article, Bill Ferguson, a local columnist for The Telegraph (Macon, Georgia), attempts to give readers a strong political soporific, as to deaden their need to remain informed and vigilant when it comes to guarding their Second Amendment rights from usurpation by a UN treaty.(1) But before that, he takes a swipe at conservatives, while intimating that he himself is a moderate Republican and was even a Romney supporter in the last election.(2) Once again, we have a liberal writer masquerading as a reluctant Republican or centrist, as to make his snake oil elixir a bit more palatable and convincing to his more conservative readership!

With derision, sarcasm, and subsequent lampoonery, Ferguson writes, “Based on what I have been hearing from many of the people around me since the country re-elected a certain liberal Democrat for another four years, such a collapse [of civilization] is imminent... I’m not sure exactly what all is supposed to be involved in this liberal remaking of America…”

As to the “remaking of America,” let me refresh his memory with the following presidential misdeeds in the realm of economics: The prolonged domestic misery of 23...

I have visited 70 countries all over the world. There is no healthcare system that provides the excellence that the USA system does. Much of what you read in the press is not true.(2) Virtually everyone in the USA can obtain healthcare; for those who are “involuntarily uninsured” the number is near 4% not the 47% that everyone quotes.(2,11) I would fully support some system to provide care for the involuntarily uninsured in any system or country. Furthermore, in the socialized medical systems there is a large amount of evidence that shows that cancer survivals in European socialized countries are worse that in the USA, Canada, Australia, and Japan.(5,6) Cuba is mentioned with these four, but its data is not believed. The survivals in England are the worst on the continent. Why?

Also the longevity statistics from countries around the world are based on infant mortality, which is defined differently in many countries.(8,9) In some European countries any child born less than 12 inches in length is declared stillborn and not included in their statistics. The same applies for those weighing less than a pound. So the infant mortality statistics of the USA are worse than others...

Young Stalin by Simon Montefiore is a well-researched, well-written, absorbing, and authoritative biography of Joseph Stalin's early years. Following the usual formalities, the book begins with a tantalizing "Prologue," the audacious robbery and bloody bombing at the festive Yerevan Square in the center of the town of Tiflis (now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia). The heist, carried out on June 13, 1907 by a 29-year-old "Soso" (Stalin's nickname) and his band of Georgian gangsters, was orchestrated to help finance Lenin's revolution.

The terrorists made off with a huge, incredible sum of money, approximately 300,000 rubles or over $34 million U.S. dollars, with a buying power at the time an order of magnitude greater. Dozens of people, including Tsarist Cossack guards and innocent bystanders, were killed or wounded during the attack. The red terrorists detonated a number of powerful bombs that shook the center of the town. Nevertheless, it was a perfect crime; no one talked (even then Stalin ran a tight ship with hermetically sealed security) and no one got arrested.

Most of the money was funneled clandestinely to Lenin, who had authorized the young Stalin to carry...

Fransini Giraldo is a Colombian girl who dances her own style of Salsa. In this video, she dances to the rhythm of Sonora Carruseles de Colombia, presumably in the Colombia countryside. Published July 16, 2013.